"Paradigm Shift" Participants

James WERNER

Post Media Awareness and the Art Museum’s Evolution

Session:Paradigm Shift

Panel:Panel A

Time:15.30-17.00

Venue:

ABSTRACT:
This paper examines the physical and virtual reinvention of leading art venues as crucial and inevitable as they evolve to become collaborative spaces of public expression and practice. Working with the High Museum of Art, Southern Polytechnic State University’s New Media Arts program created two venues for geospatial and gallery centered data visualization. Using GPS, they offer patron collaborations and contributions to artwork and art events. Both are now being developed as permanent fixtures at the High Museum to enhance museum experience. This development began when the museum approached our program with a goal to reinvent its role in the wake of new media-centric requirements demanded from younger generations – its future donors. The projects exhibit the unification of multiple telepresent and social media theories in a venue that has been forced to challenge its own position in the relevance of social hierarchies and changing roles of art. These new venues put the evolution of art closer to the will of patrons and interdisciplinary perspectives, yet still inevitably situate the control of augmented space with those who create its limits. I discuss this and other projects that consummate notions of art and museum evolution as suggested by Arthur Danto and Peter Weibel, and the Hegelian notion that society eventually outgrows its known forms of artistic experiences. Referencing Badiou, I argue that these changes indicate a pedagogical directive for interdisciplinary art practices that are facilitated by museums, but actualized through creative events unhindered by the biases of art’s histories and philosophies.